Well, the good news on this race: despite the presence of four candidates, it’s going to be pretty quick to write up. Shout out to the John Edwards and his “hyperlocal news empire,” WedgeLIVE, which has this race as covered as anyone could ask. (Here’s an article on the origins of WedgeLIVE in 2014. If you like my commentary and you live in Ward 10, you should absolutely start following this guy on Twitter, because he’s super-local, heavily focused on Ward 10, and he has a gift for finding the sort of bizarre moments that make local politics so surreal. That gum story made the international news, apparently — I mean, down in the “weird random shit that happened this week among those wacky Americans” tidbits — and he was the first to report it.)

This is one of those races where my opinion seems to be out of step with the opinion of a lot of people I respect and generally think of as sensible, and I’m honestly not sure if they simply have a different attitude about what constitutes a deal breaker, or if they missed the news story about Alondra Cano doxing a bunch of her constituents, or if there’s some EVEN WORSE story out there about Gary Schiff and Mohamed Farah and I just missed it?

This is the sort of straightforward race that’s almost as easy to write about as an uncontested seat. Vote for Andrea Jenkins! A long-time policy aide to Glidden, Andrea is sufficiently popular and beloved that despite the open seat, she was unopposed for endorsement.

There are ten candidates on the St. Paul ballot. I’m going to break them into two groups: the people who might conceivably win the mayoral race and the people who are absolutely not going to win, so you don’t need to read about them unless you’re really just here for the snark, anyway.

And because this is St. Paul, everyone gets six slots. You can rank more than half of these people, which, let’s face it, is more slots than most of us are going to have any use for. I said this over on the ranked-choice post and I’ll say it again: figure out who your first, second, and third choices are among Dai Thao, Pat Harris, and Melvin Carter. If there’s any of those three that you do not want to see as mayor, you will in fact want to make sure the other two are on your ballot.

I’m going to start by talking about the five non-leading candidates. I’ll come back to the five leading candidates tomorrow in a separate post.

Lisa Goodman has been on the council as long as Barb Johnson, and is such a staunch ally that their names tend to run together in a whole lot of articles. She represents what the city website refers to as “beautiful, stable, in-demand residential neighborhoods like Kenwood, Lowry Hill, Cedar-Isles-Dean, and Bryn Mawr.” If you’re reading from out of town and thinking, “oh, is that where the rich people live?” that would be a YES. (They are rich Democrats, however.) Lisa also represents part of downtown and the Loring Park neighborhood.